


The Hedgehog's Dilemma

by I Am Your Spy (GroteskBurlesque)



Series: Departure Points [1]
Category: Fargo (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Fix-It, Flashbacks, Fluff, Homophobic Language, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-17 04:55:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3516077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroteskBurlesque/pseuds/I%20Am%20Your%20Spy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Bleeding out into the snow like a punctured, over-ripened fruit, he has two synchronous thoughts: One, that he needs to survive long enough to know which end of that gunfire Wrench was on, and the other, that there is no fucking way he is going to die in goddamn Duluth."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. LEGS-IN-AIR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Mr. Numbers hovering between life and death, Molly's conversation with Mr. Wrench goes slightly differently.

Winter’s never shown him any mercy. In that respect, it’s no different than anything else. 

Numbers doesn’t see Malvo coming, fuck, how can he in all this shit, doesn’t even feel the knife until it twists sharp and unforgiving in his back and he realizes he’s fucked up and fucked up good. The cold is biting, his toes numb in his boots, and the blade opens him up to admit the chill, invites the death right into him. Malvo cradles him in a grotesque parody of intimacy, as close as a lover ever held him, and the last word that ever froths out from his frozen lips is, “Fargo.” 

The cut across his throat is a relief, spilling liquid warmth down his chest, and Malvo lowers him into the deep snow like he’s putting a child to bed, and Numbers sinks into it gratefully. He’s done with it now, dying like a slaughtered lamb, like a fucking putz at the hand of this maniac, done in by a force more savage and ruthless than himself, but done nonetheless. Even the pain will be over soon, exiting his body as his soul does, in little white wisps of breath.

Malvo’s long gone into the storm before he hears, “He’s dead, I think.” _There, you called it asshole, you’d know more than me._ And then the second man is gone too. Curtains. Nothing to do now but lie there in the reddening blanket and close his eyes.

Somewhere that’s not distant at all he hears gunshots, semiautomatic fire and then two sharp reports that end it.

Numbers groans. He’s not done yet after all.

Bleeding out into the snow like a punctured, over-ripened fruit, he has two synchronous thoughts: One, that he needs to survive long enough to know which end of that gunfire Wrench was on, and the other, that there is no fucking way he is going to die in goddamn Duluth.

Feebly, his body resisting the last impulses of his dying brain, he manages to reach a shaking hand to his throat, pushes the glove tight into the gaping slash. He drags himself forward with his other arm, twin stabs of agony through his back with every tortured inch he gains. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the thick trail of red behind him, already filling in with white. 

It’s hell, it’s the worst pain he’s ever known—and he’s endured a _lot_ of pain—and all through it he tells himself that Wrench is somewhere in that blank, swirling sea, surrounded by people who want him dead. _Hold on, you big dumb shit,_ he thinks, _I’m coming for you._

Fifteen years ago, in a motel room with a tobacco-stained carpet and a busted heater, he’d told Wrench that he wasn’t going to rescue him. It’s only fitting that he should spend the last few minutes of his life doing exactly what he swore he wouldn’t.

There’s nothing, not even death, that God loves more than fucking irony.

He crawls for a thousand years, sliding on his belly through the snow as the life leaks out of him, blinking snowflakes out of his eyelashes, and it’s all for nothing, almost nothing, because the dark heap before him is unmistakable, and completely motionless. He almost doesn’t make the last few feet, but he forces himself forward, choking on his own blood. Wrench is on his side, facing away from him, and Numbers doesn’t have the strength to turn him around or even to reach over and check his breathing; instead, he slumps into his partner’s back and shuts his eyes. 

 _Fucking romantic. Bet you’d love this._  

Wrench’s body is still warm, or at least less cold than everything else, solid and silent amid the myriad daggers of the storm, and, his consciousness floating just above the ocean of pain, he tells himself that they’re together, like they’ve been so many times before, in the last flickering seconds before sleep overtakes them both. Just a few more harsh moments of waking and then the release of darkness. He is falling, and falling, and won’t ever remember hitting the ground.

 

* * *

 

 

They lose him twice in the ambulance. It doesn’t stick. He’s a hard man, and he’s faced worse. Both times, he tells the white light to go fuck itself.

 

* * *

 

“Tell ‘im his partner’s dead and he’s gonna spend the rest of his life in jail.” 

That’s Schmitt, the old lieutenant who Gus had mentioned was a bit of a prick. Molly smiles at him brightly, even bats her long eyelashes a little. Neither of the statements he’s just made are, speaking for this very moment, exactly true, though from what she hears it’s just a matter of time. There’d been mutters in the OR—so she’s heard—about why they were wasting valuable hospital resources to revive someone who, at best, is facing a life sentence in prison. But he’s still breathing, for now. 

“Right, yeah, but—”

“He ain’t gonna talk. I’ve met his type before.”

Molly seriously doubts that. She’s met Schmitt’s type before, another old man who sees a lady and all at once becomes an expert in everything.

“But if he does,” Schmitt continues, “it’ll be because he doesn’t see another way out, y’know?”

“I know.”

“So that’s what you tell him, right?”

“Right.”

Molly shuffles down the hospital hallway. She’s favoring her left leg, every step sending bright aftershocks of pain up her side. The IV pole, her constant companion, jangles down the polished floor, echoing her ungainly limp. She wonders if she’ll have it for the rest of her life, like her dad. The surgeon said you can live a perfectly normal life without a spleen, but she feels raw, gutted open like a fish, her insides about to gush forth if she pulls too hard on the stitches.

She pauses a moment by the door, looking through the glass. The officer outside lets her in. “Get yourself a coffee,” she tells him.

There’s two of her bullets still inside of him but they’ve got the fella handcuffed to a gurney, just in case. He’s awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling, still as death but for the slight rise and fall of his chest and the ripple over his Adam’s apple when he swallows. Schmitt tells her he hasn’t said a word. They can’t get a statement out of him. Hard case, professional, like. Maybe they’ll have better luck with a woman; he’ll think she’s not a threat. Molly shrugs at the suggestion; that’s worked before. Her grey bathrobe draped over a hospital gown, greasy hair tied back in a ponytail, she hardly looks the part of a tough-as-nails deputy.

The fella on the bed doesn’t even acknowledge her presence until she crosses his field of vision. He’s so coolly detached that it’s like he’s deaf and dumb or something. “Remember me?” she asks.

He rattles the handcuffs. He’s so massive that for a giddy moment she thinks he’s going to break free of them altogether, spring off the bed, and strangle her like some monster in a horror movie. But it’s just a gesture. He mimes writing, and she turns to see the whiteboard hanging on the wall behind her.

Molly’s confused for a split second, and then it all clicks together—his silence in the insurance office and his utter lack of reaction now.  She grabs the whiteboard and hands it to him.

 _Partner?,_ he scrawls, which is the point at which she’s supposed to be a good girl and do as she’s told. She’s practiced it all, the head shake and the slight frown and even the sympathetic note in her voice, not that it would do any good where this fella’s concerned. 

Thing is, she’s been right about everything else so far, so.

“Still in ICU,” she says, and he grimaces, gestures at his own ear. She says it again, slower. He nods. The look of relief on his face is palpable. She sits down in the chair beside his bed, shifting her body around the pain. The place where her spleen used to be, presumably, reminds her of its absence. Funny, she’d never thought of it being there before. 

He writes: _I need to see him,_ as though he were actually in a position to make that kind of demand. 

Molly shakes her head, and his face crumples. For all his size, he might be an orphan child, bereft and frightened. “Jeez,” she says, half turned away so as she can’t tell if he can tell what she’s saying. “What the heck kind of a hit man _are_ you?”

He underlines the word “need.” Twice. He attacks the second line with enough violence that it dents the nib of the dry erase marker and leaves him wincing in pain.

“Hurts, huh?” she says, before she can remember that he can’t hear the softness in her words, before she can remember that she’s the reason he’s handcuffed to a bed with two bullets in him. He jerks his head away from her. “Mine too.”

There’s not a soft bone in her body, morphine haze or not, but she feels an odd form of kinship with the man, laid up like he is with no one but the person who shot him for company. Their positions weren’t so different, really, except for how he was a killer for hire—presumably, she doesn’t know what else he’d be doing out there in the snowstorm with an assault rifle—and her an officer of the law. He probably _does_ deserve to rot in jail for the rest of his life, he’s probably killed loads of people, but there’s also something vulnerable in his silence and those big green eyes.

She tilts his chin back towards her, which is a stupid thing to do, with his other arm still free. He could crush her windpipe with just one of those huge hands—but he doesn’t. She writes, _Lorne Malvo_ on the whiteboard.

“Is that who you were after?”

There’s expression even in his silence. His brow furrows; a closing-up of a drawbridge, the tightening of muscles hidden beneath his hospital gown. She makes one last play.

“He cut up your partner pretty bad. Slashed his throat. Doctor said he might not make it.”

He sucks in a breath, his eyes bulging out of his head. She can’t tell if it’s from the pain or her words.

“It’ll go easier on you if you cooperate. Y’know. At trial.”

It’s her first misstep, but it’s enough. His head whips back to face away from her. _Okay, conversation over, I get it,_ but she doesn’t leave, not right away. There’s a crack there in his walls, somewhere, if she can only find it. And of all the mysteries she’s uncovered, this one’s hardly the most cryptic.

Back in her own hospital room, she picks up the beige phone and dials out. 

“Hey Gus,” she says, striding with confidence through his torrent of stammered apologies. “Got a favor to ask.”

* * *

He’s still falling. He tells himself that as long as he’s falling, he hasn’t hit bottom. 

Somewhere there is a flurry of movement. It’s not a good thing for a hit man to be the center of attention. There’s nothing he can do but ride it out, let others fight off the Angel of Death for him while he sinks deeper into memory, retreats from the bright torture of the present.

* * *

It starts off with the job. It is always the job. 

The syndicate threw the deaf kid at him as a joke, yeah, maybe you’ll manage to not piss this one off with all your bullshit since he can’t hear you, hah hah hah, plus he’s a fag too, and Numbers had pictured something different, someone harder, not fucking Jon Voight in _Midnight Cowboy._ The kid’s not more than 19 and he’s scared shitless, even though the story the Aussie tells him of how the syndicate found him paints him as anything but a dew-eyed innocent.

“Nice,” Numbers says. “How’m I supposed to fucking talk to him?”

The Aussie raises up his hands in an exaggerated shrug and slams the door, leaving them to it.

Their first job together goes badly. Which is to say that it goes right in the sense that their target winds up dead, but so do half a dozen other people, and it’s all Wrench’s fault. In fairness, Wrench ends up saving both their asses too, in a furious orgy of violence that leaves an Olympic-sized swimming pool of blood sinking into the concrete floor of the warehouse, but that hardly redeems him. It isn’t _planned_ and it isn’t _clean._ Numbers glares and seethes at him and brushes bits of skull and hair off his _brand new fucking suit,_ all the time Wrench just watches him, mute, his hands moving in a language Numbers doesn’t understand.

What a fucking moron.

After the bodies get dumped and phone calls get made, they hole up for the night in a motel room. Wrench sits on the bed, cheerfully oblivious to Numbers berating him. Numbers slips off his suit jacket, which is ruined anyway, and sees that the sting in his upper arm isn’t a strained muscle but a bullet graze.

Wrench looks immediately contrite and he stands up to guide Numbers into the bathroom. This goes badly as well. Numbers tries to get away—the last thing he wants is this idiot _touching_ him—but the idiot is built like a brick shithouse, and struggling is only going to make his arm worse. So he lets the dumb hick manhandle him so he’s sitting on the toilet seat, and then the kid is cleaning his wound with a washcloth so carefully that it barely even hurts and winding gauze around it and somewhere in the middle of it all they make eye contact and he’s _fucked._

Wrench brings one of those huge hands up to his face. He strokes the side of Numbers’ face. Once, then again, like he’s fascinated, like he’s apologizing, who the fuck knows? Then he leans in and _of course_ presses his lips to Numbers’.

“You gonna beat me to death?” Which—by the way—is what happened to the last guy who fucked him, a syndicate member whose extracurricular predilections were not exactly a secret to anyone. Word was he’d gotten rough with a hustler and said hustler had brained him with a wrench. That was more than enough to justify disposing of the chump and being done with it, but the guy sent to collect the kid was impressed with his propensity for violence and decided to give him a shot at compensating them for their loss.

Wrench frowns; obviously something Numbers said or did irritates him, which is not unusual for people who spend any amount of time around Numbers. _Not you,_ he mouths, and leans in again.

“You’re the shittiest hit man I’ve ever met,” Numbers declares, and kisses him back.

It’s awkward; they can’t actually communicate beyond exaggerated pronunciations and several explicit hand gestures to determine what goes where and in whom, but it’s—Numbers grudgingly admits—well worth it. Wrench fucks like he kills, like a force of nature. He lifts Numbers up against the bathroom door and buries himself to the hilt, and Numbers is actually glad the kid can’t hear because he’s pretty sure that the noises he makes are undignified as all shit. He gives back as good as he gets—he’s queer as fuck but he’s no _pansy_ —and they’re both left sweaty and bruised and aching in the best possible way and that whole bit is great.

It’s what follows that’s the problem, and continues to be the problem for the next fifteen years. 

After, lying on the motel bed, spent and sticky, Wrench drapes one of those big arms over Numbers and spoons around him, breath soft against the back of his ear.

Numbers does his best to bolt.

“Oh no. No, no, no.” He gets free, kind of, though his injured arm protests at the sudden movement. Wrench drags him back down and holds him more securely. Nuzzles—look, there’s no other word for it—the back of his neck. And it’s good, it’s really good, but it’s not fucking _professional._

He gets where the kid is coming from. Even without Wrench telling him the no doubt tragic story about how he’s all alone in the world without anyone to look after him—which is more than obvious from the way he dresses—it’s not that hard to figure out. He’s just a kid. Numbers has never been responsible for anyone else before; he doesn’t _want_ to be responsible for anyone, least of all a deaf mute with atrocious fashion sense and zero sense of self-preservation. He’s seen that dreamy look in the kid’s eyes before. It’s the look that guys get when they’re tired of the job and start fantasizing about what happens after the killing’s done, how they’re going to save their money and get out and settle down somewhere and go clean.

Numbers was born into it; his entire family’s with the syndicate, the ones who are still alive, anyway, and he knows there isn’t any other life. There is no _after_.

But even now, he knows he’s going to tolerate this. For one thing, if you are somehow under the impression that the North Dakota criminal underworld is teeming with a surplus of handsome, well-hung gay men, well, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. There’s an inevitability to it all, and if it means that the spaces between killings get filled with the best sex of his life, well, he’ll deal with the cuddling. That’s what he tells himself.

What he tells Wrench is, “I’m not gonna rescue you.”

Wrench reaches over to the nightstand for the pad of paper he carries around. He studies it carefully, then writes something down. He tears off the page and thrusts it at Numbers.

_What the fuck makes you think I need rescuing, asshole?_

“You’re the asshole,” Numbers says, and Wrench grins. Just like that, they’re friends, and until Malvo's knife puts an end to the whole thing, they gleefully murder their way across the American heartland.


	2. IN/OUT EARS/EYES

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Negotiations, past and present.

“A camera?” Gus sounds incredulous, like this is the strangest thing Molly could be asking him for, stranger even than a spleen. She laughs. It hurts to laugh, but she can’t help it when he’s that flustered.

“Yeah,” she says. “Like, one of them little digital ones.”

“Uh huh,” Gus says, his words tumbling and cascading over top each other, and later she’ll think maybe that’s when she fell in love with him a bit. “I got Greta one for her birthday. It’s a few years old, so.”

“Perfect,” Molly tells him. “Can you bring it by?”

“The hospital?” 

“Not like I’m goin’ anywhere else any time soon.” At his, “oh, right,” she feels a squidge of guilt for teasing him, only not really. He’s just so darned _earnest._ It’s adorable.

True to his word, he brings it by that afternoon, along with yet another bouquet of flowers. Having run out of proper flower receptacles, she puts them in a coffee mug by the window and winds the cord of the little camera around her finger. 

“What do you need a camera for?” Gus asks.

“Not for me,” she replies. “For the deaf fella. Need to show him something, except he’s not exactly mobile. Wanna help me do a bad thing?”

She is absolutely certain that—short of near-fatal accidents and omissions, anyway—Gus has never done a bad thing in his life, but he was also (this, she realizes with an unexpected flutter) eager to impress her, and he is nodding even as she balances her weight against the IV pole, testing her slippers against the floor. “Do you need…”

“I’m _fine,_ ” Molly says, then, reconsidering, lets him take her arm. His fingers are warm through the loose fabric of her bathrobe, pleasantly so.

“So, you, uh.”

“Still not mad at you.” 

They take the elevator to the third floor. At some point, Gus has probably figured out where they’re headed; Molly raises a finger to her lips and shushes him. They’re not the focus of anyone’s attention up here, and Gus easily distracts the officer on guard duty while she presses up against the door.

There’s a clear line of sight to the bed where the deaf fella’s partner is lying, unconscious, hooked up to a respirator and a solemnly beeping army of machines and tubes. She fits the camera to the glass and zooms in as far as it goes. The flash fires off the first time and the image is nothing but white; she looks to see if anyone’s noticed, but the guard is still happily chatting away to Gus and the various nurses and doctors are consumed with the business of keeping people alive, so she flicks the flash button off and tries again.

This time, it’s a bit blurry but she can make out the outline of his profile, the heavy brow and prominent nose, a thick black streak of eyelashes against pale skin. There’s a bandage over his throat that’s already spotted with blood, and she wonders if she should maybe tell someone about that. Then she remembers that she’s probably not even supposed to be up here. She has to gesture to Gus a few times before he’s able to break away from the conversation and join her at the elevator. 

“Wanna tell me what all that was about?”

Molly shrugs. “That fella’s the interpreter, right?”

“He’s not gonna be doing much interpreting.” Ever, from the looks of it. Schmitt said that there wasn’t much left of his larynx; even if he lives, he won’t be able to speak. 

“No. But the deaf fella seems awfully concerned about him. I thought if maybe—y’know, if he knew he was okay.”

“He’s not okay.”

“But.”

“See your point. Are you…?”

“Still fine.”

Her hip is aching by the time she reaches the deaf fella’s room. Gus stands a foot or two behind her, arms crossed over his chest. She envies his uniform, his gun. Both sit uncomfortably on him, but not nearly so much as the hospital gown does on her.

“Hey,” she says, but the deaf fella isn’t looking at her. She bites her lip, then reaches out and quickly shakes his ankle. He grunts, startled; it’s the first sound she’s heard from him. “Hey,” she says again. “I, uh, brought you something. Can I?” She motions at the chair. He stares past her, impassive. She sits anyway. She’s been on her feet for way too long today.

Molly glances at Gus, then turns the camera on. She flips past pictures of Greta and her friends until she hits the last one. She holds it up where the man can see it.

He squints at the screen. A choked noise forces its way through his lips. He brings up his free hand, flinching at the pain, closes his long fingers over hers in an attempt to tug the camera free.

“Be careful with it,” she hears herself say. “It’s not mine.” But he cradles it in his palm with a reverence that belies his size, as though it’s a delicate, priceless artifact, as though it’s the only thing of its kind in the world. He brings it close to his face and stares, takes several slow, deliberate breaths. One finger traces over the LCD display, then his head turns sharply back towards her. “I can’t let you see him,” she says. “I know you want to. This was kinda the next best thing.”

He puts the camera down on the pillow beside him and reaches for the whiteboard.

 _Blankets_.

“You want more blankets?” She’s not sure when she turned from his shooter to his nurse, but she’s looking around the room anyway. He shakes his head. “Oh. For him. He’s, uh, he’s unconscious, y’know?”

_He’s always bitching about the cold._

She wasn’t wrong about him having a weak spot, and she wasn’t wrong about what it was. Gus says, quietly—not that it matters—“So, not just the interpreter, then?”

She pats the man’s hand, and he blinks up at her with red-rimmed, startled eyes. She’s never met a hit man before and she’s not sure what she expected, but it certainly wasn’t _this._

“I’ll see what I can do,” she says. “But you have to give me something, okay? We’re after the same guy. He did this to your partner, and he—he killed my friend.” Maybe that’s too many words; she’s not sure how well he can lip read, but he’s nodding in understanding. In the rush of events, through the shooting and the haze of painkillers, she’s barely thought about Vern, but it’s all coming back now.

He sighs. _Malvo killed Hess. Nygaard knows Malvo._

“How?”

Another blink, then an eye roll. He doesn’t care or, more likely, he doesn’t know.

“What’s your connection?”

He circles _Hess._

“Why?”

He taps the tip of the marker against the word _blankets,_ then turns his head to look at the camera again. 

“Okay. I get it, I think.” She moves to retrieve the camera; he moans audibly. It must be the morphine addling her brain, because she actually feels _sorry_ for him. She takes it anyway; it’s got the pictures of Greta on it, and that’s a bit creepy, him looking at those. “I’ll come back,” she promises, but he’s gone off again, staring at the indent in the pillow by his head.

Gus helps her to her feet. After moving around so much, she’s a little dizzy. “Bed,” she says. “Faster, preferably?”

“Sorry, I should have—”

“Gus Grimly, if you apologize _one more time._ ”

A nervous chuckle, and equilibrium is restored. “That was weird, huh?” 

“Weird. Yeah.” What if it were Vern whose life hung in the balance, who was so close and so unreachable? What if it were Gus? She couldn’t say she’d act any different. 

She hobbles back to her room. She sits on the bed and waits until he nervously backs his way out, then goes to stand by the window. She writes a name in the cold condensation, another, then a line between them, drawing out a vast web of death over the city below.

* * *

 

Light flares behind his closed eyelids and he thinks they’re back for him again, dragging him from the world and his own failing flesh. The machines beep faster. He clings to life like he has any claim on it at all, like any of this means anything. 

* * *

They’re five months into their partnership the first time he almost loses the kid.

They’re better at working together now. Numbers has picked up a bit of ASL and Wrench is attuned to his every movement and frequently volatile moods. They’re far from the well-oiled machine they will one day become, but the syndicate is impressed, and Wrench’s death sentence appears to be revoked. But no one’s perfect and the men they’re sent to kill this time are nearly as tough as they are. One of the guys they’d assumed was down isn’t down for good. Numbers barks out a warning but of course Wrench doesn’t hear it, and the guy gets one good smash across the side of his skull with a steel pipe before Numbers splatters his brains across the shore of the St. Croix River.

Wrench goes down hard, and there’s so much blood that Numbers thinks he’s dead, but he’s able to stagger to the car, and he’s conscious by the time Numbers gets him to one of those shady off-brand doctors that seem to circle syndicate operations like vultures. He’s stitched up and shuffled off and Numbers has instructions to wake him up every hour, ask him if he knows who he is, and call if he starts vomiting. Or dies. It’s all very reassuring.

He hates this plan but he gets the kid to the safe house and into bed. Wrench is pale and shaky and there’s still blood all over his shirt, so Numbers undresses him and washes him up and somehow he’s become responsible for the kid, for his survival, and he resents it. He’s lost partners before but it’s always been to sudden death, far removed from his power to change anything about it. And besides, he’s never let himself get close to any of them before.

Shouting at him doesn’t work, so he resigns himself to roughly shaking Wrench awake every hour, half the time getting punched in the nose for his efforts. The kid is disorientated and no less strong for being injured, and Numbers feels like the worst kind of asshole but he does it anyway, and makes up for it by sort of petting his hair every time Wrench manages to bring his hands together in that sign that Numbers can’t help but find a little obscene, even now. He wraps himself around his partner’s broad back and murmurs things he can’t hear and so they don’t count. He’s never held anyone like that before and knows it’s a terrible idea, but the truth is he likes Wrench—even without the really fantastic sex, which after five months remains fantastic—more than he’s ever liked another human being.

Yeah, right, of _course_ he likes a guy who gives every appearance of listening to his bullshit but actually can’t. He’s pretty sure the syndicate thinks that’s what’s going on with them. Wrench does pay attention, though, he hangs off Numbers’ every word, and he’s smart and—now that Numbers can mostly understand him—funny, and when he takes a life, he is swift and pitiless and utterly beautiful.

During the worst of it, at five in the morning when Wrench’s breathing is at shallow tide and he shudders under the thin blankets, Numbers bargains with God. He’s never met a hit man who wasn’t a religious son-of-a-bitch, and he’s not the exception. He’ll give anything, fucking _anything,_ for the kid to live. He’ll learn ASL. He’ll call his mother more often. He’ll tell Fargo to go fuck itself and go straight—okay, for a certain value of straight. Anything. 

Wrench whimpers. It’s awful, that sound, all the worse since he’s not even aware he’s making it. Numbers strokes his bruised temple and shushes him. That calms him right down, and he’s murdered dozens of people but he’s never done _this,_ never tented his hands over someone else’s dying embers to keep them burning.

For that, he hates Wrench, as much as anyone can.

“You have _no right,_ ” he hisses. “No fucking right to do this to me.”

He resolves to cut it off as soon as Wrench recovers, if he recovers. Because he likes him. And so it can’t continue.

The next morning, the first complete sentence he ever signs amounts to a curt, _you’re the best partner I’ve ever had but the rest of it is finished,_ but for now he grips Wrench tighter and telling himself that no, his heart hasn’t grown any sizes larger, thank you very fucking much.


	3. POINT-BREAK-THROUGH

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone fails at being a professional.

“They’re taking him off life support today.”

The deaf fella draws in a sharp breath before Molly realizes there’s a heck of a nasty ambiguity in her statement, and she says, maybe too quickly, “No, that’s _good_ news, means they think he can breathe on his own now, so.”

She knows it’s cruel to get his hopes up like that. Even if they both make it through this, they’ll probably never see each other again unless they end up sharing a prison cell. But she can tell he wants to talk about his partner, even if the conversation’s mostly one-way, and it’s the price for what _she_ wants, which is to make sense of it all. 

There are three people who believe her about Lester Nygaard. Her dad might, but he wants her out of it, wants her home and safe and preferably to be something other than a cop. Gus believes her too, but he knows what she knows, nothing more than that.  

The deaf fella doesn’t know all of it, she’s sure, but he knows more than he lets on. The more she can get him to open up—about anything, really—the better chance she has of making him talk about the case. _Quid quo pro, Clarice,_ that sort of thing.

“What’s your name?” she asks him abruptly. “I’m Det—er, Molly.” No use reminding him that she’s a cop, and “Molly” is probably easier for him to lip-read.

He scowls and pretends not to understand her for a second, then reaches over to form a sign that looks kinda rude. She gives him the benefit of the doubt; probably the cuffs and the IV and the heart monitor make signing a bit awkward.

“Your parents name you that?” she asks, and he responds with something that might be aiming for a smile but comes off a lot more like the bared teeth of a rabid dog.

He writes, _Breathing?_

“Looks like.”

_Conscious?_

“He’s been through a lot,” she says. “They’re thinkin’ it might be…some time.” That’s bad; he’s got the most to say when she has something concrete to exchange the information for. Vaguely worded non-answers, which is all she ever gets, aren’t enough. “Is there, y’know, someone else I should call? _Do_ you have parents?”

He glares.

“I just got my dad,” she says. “Vern, he and I were friends, good friends, but. I never got married or anything. I don’t see how you can, with the job. Have you—I mean, did you always…?”

Another pause, then he shakes his head. How did someone even become a hit man? She doesn’t even know how someone like him would even apply for a regular sort of job, let alone that.

“Why, then? You don’t seem like such a bad fella, when you’re not pointin’ a bazooka at me.”

It feels strange, admitting it out loud, and maybe it’s that he’s laid up in a hospital bed that makes him seem harmless, but she doesn’t think it’s just that. He looks so lost, so desolate, that she can’t manage to be afraid of him. Besides, he’s a good listener—the best she’s got, since her dad has the restaurant back home to mind and Gus has to work, at least until the inquiry.

He writes, _Good at two things,_ with a leering smirk that leaves no room for speculation as to what those two things might be.

Molly blushes. “Jeez. Sorry I asked.” She shifts in the chair. She’s healed up enough that lying in bed is mind-numbingly boring, but not so much that there’s any one position that doesn’t give her excruciating pain if she holds it for longer than ten minutes. “I always wanted to be a cop. Just like my dad. Sounds stupid like that, when you say it out loud. It ain’t even about protecting people, not deep down. It’s figuring out the puzzles, y’see. I gotta know _why_.”

He’s watching her, whether out of interest or a lack of alternatives, his face impassive, devoid of judgment or condemnation.

“Who is Malvo?”

A hesitation. _Freelancer._

“Freelancer hit man? They have those?”

He shrugs.

“So he drives here to dump the naked fella, meets Lester in the hospital, and Lester convinces him to kill Hess. But then he doesn’t come through on the payment, so Malvo goes to Lester’s house and kills Pearl and Vern. That makes sense, that’s a—a chain of causation—though I can’t see Lester orderin’ a _hit_ on someone. He’s so…” _Mousey_. “Timid.” He smirks and shakes his head again. “No? Still, you’d think a hit man would be more cautious.” Given the pile up of bodies, it’s clear Malvo isn’t, but she can’t help but think she’s missing something big.

She sits for a time, and finally he rolls his eyes and scrawls on the white board again. _File?_

“You wanna see the police file? I don’t have it here, and even if I did, it’s an open investigation and you’re a _suspect,_ so _._ ” That’s easy to forget; she can’t let herself forget it. “Why?” She already knows the answer. He’s a trapped animal, resigned to his fate, but there’s a mind in there, caged in silence. He’s bored and hurting and wants distraction, and—

_Revenge,_ he writes, and his eyes go all hard and glinting. Oh.

“It’s all here anyway,” she says, tapping her forehead. She settles in to the chair. He sits up, suddenly all attentive, like Vern used to be whenever she got a theory, and that’s enough to spur her on. “Okay, so, like, here’s what I’m thinkin’…”

* * *

The first breath he takes on his own is thick and painful, a fog concealing thousands of tiny knives. He triumphs in it never the less; he has existence by the balls and there’s nothing that can make him let go now. He’s still drowning, but he can see the thick ice crusted over the surface, the diffuse glow of daylight beyond. 

Just a little farther. Even now, a part of him resists waking, knows that the instant he stops drowning, he’ll burn. But he drags himself towards consciousness anyway. In the end, the only blessing he’ll ever remember is a plea for more life.

* * *

It’s a year to the day when he gets the tattoo. They’re on a three-day job and it’s the kind of action that feels impulsive, but, like all of his tattoos, the idea has been percolating in the back of his head for an uncomfortable eternity. 

The tattoo is itching like a bastard when he puts a bullet in the head of a schmuck who, had he been afforded the rest of a natural lifespan, would still never have lived long enough to repay the gambling debts he’s racked up, and it bothers him enough that he’s snippier than usual with Wrench, leaving him the cleanup and slinking off to the motel room before he tears the bandage off in an irritated rage.

He’s half-undressed, mulling over the script in the white-streaked bathroom mirror, when Wrench gets back. There’s no point in covering up—even if they haven’t touched in months, Wrench has already had his mouth around Numbers’ cock and there’s nothing left to the imagination between them. Wrench looms over him, scanning the new addition to his canvas.

Numbers expects Wrench to get pissy, but he laughs it off. _Boundaries?_

_Got a problem with that?_

The kid—who, Numbers has to admit, is no longer a kid, having shed whatever remained of his redneck naivety to become as hard-assed and cruel as anyone else in the syndicate—traces a path with his fingertip like a 100,000 volt electric shock over his collarbone. Numbers shoves him away and stalks over to one of the beds.

“I told you,” he says to the floor instead of to his partner, because it’s _right there_ on his skin in indelible black ink and can’t be any clearer unless he seared it with a cattle brand onto the dumb fuck’s _face._ The bed dips beside him. “What? Fuck off.”

Wrench pushes him down on the bed and straddles him, the dead mook’s blood still speckled across his cheek, and Numbers is consumed with the sick urge to lick it off him. Furious scowls are exchanged.

_It’s about being a fucking professional,_ Numbers signs.

_Keep telling yourself that._

_I have a right to protect myself._ He’d never say anything like that out loud, but neither the blunt syntax of ASL nor the weight of his partner pinning his thighs to the bed allows for much in the way of evasion.

When Wrench bends down to touch his lips to the new tattoo—softly, but enough to reawaken the sting of the needle—he can’t disguise how much he wants it. Wants _him_. There’s never been anything good in his life that hasn’t been taken away from him eventually. He knows he’ll have to stand over Wrench’s corpse—the kid is as close to a marginally decent person he’s ever met and it’s a wonder he’s even managed to live this long—and it’ll hurt more on that day if he gives in now.

He doesn’t know the sign language for that particular sentiment. He doesn’t even know where to start.

Wrench grimaces in frustration and signs: _You act like a guy who thinks he’s going to live forever._

_Maybe I will._

_You wanna spend that time moping or getting fucked?_

He snorts and loops his arm around Wrench’s neck, drawing him into a bruising kiss. “Fuck you,” he gasps into the other man’s mouth, and for the rest of the night, doesn’t say anything else at all.


	4. CIGARETTE GONE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feelings are hard.

“So get this.” Molly’s on the phone with Gus, and she feels about twelve years old, trading gossip with her girlfriends past her bedtime. With the bed tilted up, she can see the city’s lights through her flowchart of the criminal conspiracy that’s now got a body count in the double digits. “Lester is sleeping with Mrs. Hess.”

“Deaf fella tell you that?”

“Uh, well, he didn’t say ‘sleeping with.’” Actually, it was pretty amazing just how graphic a guy who couldn’t talk could get. But she doesn’t tell Gus that. Her cheeks are already burning just _thinking_ about the conversation.

“You believe him?” She can hear clattering in the background; he’s doing the dishes. A glance at the clock and her own sad, untouched Jell-O container reminds her that it’s just past dinner. Loneliness tugs at her; had the blizzard been less fierce, had there been just a few feet more of visibility, she might be there with him, holding a dishtowel and listening to Greta signal her friends with the walkie-talkie. Instead she’s lying in bed, the chill seeping through the window.

Her dad has been bargaining with the doctors to release her, and she might go along with it except that there’s more information to be had in the silent tomb of the hospital room. There are plenty of other cops—from Schmitt’s perspective—capable of questioning the guy, but she knows right off the bat that none of them, even with a translator, will get as far as she did. So she’s plead wooziness and pain and drawn out her stay for a day or two longer, pocketing the extra morphine pills they keep giving her.

“He had lotsa details,” Molly says. “Really…specific details. Plus the Hess kids are witnesses, so. He said all kinds of things.”

She’s spent the afternoon questioning him, actually, except it was less like an interrogation and more like a spitballing session at the precinct, if anyone other than her and Vern at the precinct were capable of tying their own shoes. He’s got a sharper mind than any cop she’s met, and uncomfortably practical experience when it comes to dead bodies. 

It still doesn’t quite add up, and there’s more he’s unwilling to talk about—likely it’d incriminate him—but she’s working on a solid theory. She’s got motive, she’s got halfway to probable cause, and the restlessness is building. With every second she’s lying here, Malvo gets further and further away, and Lester gets closer to burying the evidence.

“The way he figures it,” she says, “Malvo definitely killed Hess and Vern, but Lester definitely killed Pearl.” 

There’s a whistle on the other end of the line. “How d’you figure?”

“Angle of the blow, height of the assailant, that kinda thing. Autopsy’d show for sure.” Now that she’s saying it out loud, she’s convinced there’s every reason to arrest Lester again, at least once they revisit the forensics.

That, and—

She’d told him every detail, all she could remember from the crime scene, down to the stunned gape frozen on Pearl Nygaard’s face, the trail of blood down that stupid fish poster. 

_Personal,_ he’d written in response, _intimate,_ and she’d shivered. Husbands kill wives, she thinks, in different ways than strangers kill strangers. 

That’s the part she doesn’t tell Gus. He has a daughter, no use setting him thinking about such things. “Anyhoo. It’s all what I speculated, see, other than the thing with the widow Hess, but—” She stops, because the next thing that comes out of her mouth was about to be, _it proves I’m not crazy._  

“I guess he’d know,” Gus says. “About murder.”

There’s a bite to his voice that she’s not accustomed to hearing there. “Come again?”

“Y’know. With him being a contract killer and everything.” 

She pushes her hair back nervously, tucking a loose strand behind her ear. It’s not like she’s forgotten or anything like that, but it’s easy to let it fade into background noise when her mind’s on something else and the rapport between them gets nearly effortless.

“Oh,” she says. “I guess I’m just excited is all.” 

He clears his throat. “Don’t go turnin’ a wolf into a golden retriever puppy,” he says, all quiet and serious. “He ain’t—well, he’s not a good man. You know that, right?”

“Gus…” She rolls onto her side, and the accompanying twinge reminds her that she’s cut back on the painkillers too quickly. She’s lost in the woods, stepped out of her cozy world of break-and-enters and public intoxication into a nightmare of monsters and horrors. 

And the deaf fella hasn’t given her much to go on, not really, just about as much as she’s given him. She reminds herself that he’s another monster, one of _them_ , the forces of chaos that have somehow crept into her little town and brought hell down upon them all.

Still, she can’t help but think he’s the least of the monsters out there. There’s no real reason for it—he might very well have as much blood on his hands as Malvo, and almost certainly more than Lester. But heck, maybe it takes one to catch one, and she wants so much for him to be on her side.

There’s a knock on her hospital door. “Just a sec,” she tells Gus. Schmitt’s big head pops into her room.

“Thought you’d wanna know,” he says. “The other fella, the one with the slit throat?” 

_He’s dead,_ she thinks—there’s a funny pang at that, since he’s a killer too and she’s only met him the once—and she’s going to be the one has to tell the deaf fella about it, going to have to strike the blow that destroys him. “Yeah?”

“He’s awake,” Schmitt says.

* * *

It’s not as easy as that. Mostly, he wants to stay submerged in the past, where it’s all been predetermined and nothing new can happen. Suspended in his own memory, he’s without pain, without time. 

His dreams are a cocoon around him, at once protecting and stifling. Just below the surface, he struggles wildly, suddenly desperate to stay down. Here, there is no chance of waking and finding himself alone in the world. Nothing changes. Nothing progresses, and nothing dies.

* * *

They’ve been together for over two years before Wrench has the balls to say it. Not that he hasn’t said it with every wide-eyed dopey look he casts when he thinks Numbers isn’t paying attention, but there’s a gulf between what is known and what is carved into permanence, into gesture and from there, into words. 

It’s been one of those nights that bleeds into morning without anyone noticing, the orange tendrils of dawn creeping up over the fields of corn. Wrench is at the wheel, but it’s a long, boring stretch of highway and he’s only half paying attention to the driving.

Numbers is telling him about the katzenklavier—which he has to painstakingly spell out—because that’s the kind of shit that pops into your head at six in the morning when you’ve gone a day and a half without sleep.

_Like an organ?_ Wrench asks, the car gliding down the highway even with his hands off the wheel. He spells it out and mimes hands fluttering over a keyboard, just to clarify. There’s a shuffling noise from the back seat, which Numbers steadfastly ignores. _But with cats?_

_In cages. Rigged up to a keyboard. Arranged by the pitch of their voices. When the key was pressed, a nail would come down on the cat’s outstretched tail, and it would yowl in agony._

Wrench raises an eyebrow, oblivious to a muffled protest behind his head.

_You’re just fucking with me._  

Numbers shrugs. _It was used to treat depression._ _The sound was so pitiful that it snapped the listener out of his own—_ he has to spell the word out too, and the car swerves to one side as Wrench pays a little too much attention to him and not enough on driving— _melancholia._ He hears the man in the back seat thump into the side of the door with an aggrieved, “Mrrph.” 

“No one asked you,” Numbers tells him.

Wrench snorts. _Where do you get this shit?_

_Some of us spend our downtime reading books instead of watching porn,_ he snits.

_Is there a point?_

_Suffering is like energy. Can’t be created or destroyed, just transferred. Just inflicted._

Wrench scans the horizon for a place to pull off, and Numbers goes back to staring out the window, and that’s when he sees the gesture. It’s just out of the corner of his eye, but it’s unmistakable. And yes, he knows what that one means; it’s one of the first ones they show you in the books, and for fuck’s sake, he _did_ have a childhood of sorts, he’s watched goddamn _Sesame Street_. It was probably the first sign he learned.

He could ignore it, but he doesn’t. He stares at Wrench, and Wrench side-eyes him back without taking his hands off the wheel; it’s an old Western gunfight and neither of them willing to draw first. The heavy hiss of his partner’s breath, intensity replacing what might have in another man been chagrin, evaporates into the suddenly oppressive car interior. He can’t take it back, even if it was the ASL equivalent of a whisper, a half unseen reflex, so he makes up for it by being pissed. 

If they were like other couples—not that they’re a couple; they are not a fucking couple, whatever Wrench thinks—he could talk around it, drop sentences halfway through until the thought was lost in a miasma of pauses and starts. Wrench’s blunt language offers no such mercy.

_Since when?_ Numbers asks.

_You know the answer._

He takes a few steps closer, straightening. _Why don’t you ever say it to my face, asshole?_

Wrench signs, _because you’re a raging douchebag about it._

He opens his mouth, thinks about it for a second, lifts his hands and then clasps them together. The silence, normally so welcome, has turned oppressive, interrupted only by the juddering of the car’s engine and the muted whimpers from the back seat. 

_What do you actually think is going to happen here?_ Numbers asks finally.

_Ask questions. Dump the body. Go back to the motel. Fuck._

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he mutters. _Is that all you ever think about? That’s not what I mean._

_I’m pulling over here,_ Wrench signs, gesturing at the road in front of them, which looks no different than the road looked an hour ago and which Numbers suspects he’s chosen more as a way to end the conversation than anything else. 

There’s no one around, nothing but a few distant farmhouses, speckled against the sunrise. Numbers yanks the back door open and drags the bound man onto the gravel while his partner unties the bungee cord that’s the only thing keeping the trunk of their car closed these days. Wrench tosses the shovel that they keep back there over his shoulder and stomps into the middle of the field to start digging, pointedly ignoring Numbers, every bit the petulant child.

Does he _think_ they’re in a relationship? Is that what he thinks is going on? Numbers tugs the man’s gag off and tiredly says, “Where’s the money?” 

“Who the fuck _are_ you people?”

“Where’s the money, Frankie?” He punctuates it with a hard slap across the man’s face. It’s a relief, the outburst of violence. He can punch and choke the man— currently protesting his ignorance of the whereabouts of the syndicate’s money—to a bloody pulp. He’ll draw it out, make every blow and squelch count for something, rip the fucker’s heart out of his chest and grind it under his boot heel and feel it burst. “Where is the fucking money?” 

The man summons a last flicker of strength from somewhere and wriggles to his feet. The headbutt catches Numbers by surprise, and before he can recover his balance, Frankie’s off down the path that Wrench has trampled, screaming for help and narrowly avoiding falling into his own grave. Numbers follows at a slower pace, brushing past his partner until he has a line of sight, then draws his Glock and shoots the man in the back. An outstretched arm flaps, once, and then he’s still.

It’s unsatisfying, but it’s at least efficient.

Wrench glances over—alerted by the vibration, presumably—and shoots him a wry grin.

_Feeling better?_

Numbers tugs a hand through his hair, then, in lieu of an actual response, gives him the finger. Wrench retrieves the body, dragging it by the collar, tosses it in the hole he’s dug, and hands over the shovel.

_It ends with both of us dead,_ he signs as Numbers shovels dirt over the corpse. _That’s what happens here._

Numbers pauses, raising his forearm to his face to wipe away the sweat already beading on his face.

_That’s as much as anyone ever gets,_ Wrench adds, and starts off for the car.

* * *

Now, of course, he wishes he could stay in that moment forever. That was one of the better, cleaner jobs. Wrench was—

Wrench _is,_ currently, somewhere out in the real world, maybe in trouble, maybe dying, and Numbers was, is, the only one who ever took care of that stupid goddamned kid.

So. Fuck it. He takes as deep a breath as a man with a slit throat can manage, and opens his eyes.


	5. FEEL+DEFLATED

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Molly somehow finds herself playing intermediary between two lovesick, incapacitated hit men, because that's what you get for being nice, apparently.

The strips of fluorescent lights on the ceiling sear after so long huddled in the darkness. He squints until the dim shapes around him solidify into faces and the susurrus becomes words and he knows, for whatever good it does, that he’s back in the world. 

The voices are distorted in the fog, telling him to stay still and not to speak, as though he’s got any say in it at all. All he can think to do is spring up from the bed and demand to know where Wrench is, but his body won’t cooperate and all that escapes his mouth is a reedy wheeze that aches with every exhale.

“Sir. Sir. Can you follow my finger with your eyes?”

He’d laugh, were it not for the pain. No one’s called him “sir” in a lifetime. He tracks a slim, manicured finger across his field of vision and hears the nurse confer with someone else. Apparently he’s satisfied their medical curiosity enough for now, because once he’s done that, they leave him alone. 

Even moving his eyes is exhausting. They don’t bother trying to get him to communicate—he can’t nod or shake his head without pain—everyone just drifts around him and talks over him as though he’s an object to be observed and catalogued. With nothing more demanded of him, and nothing better to do, he passes out. 

The next time he wakes, his mind is clearer and there’s someone else in the room with him, that Bemidji deputy he met at the real estate office. He almost doesn’t recognize her without the uniform. She’s wearing a bathrobe and a hospital gown so she must be a patient here too. He strains to recall the gunfight, but he doesn’t remember anything after collapsing in the snow.

“Are you…?” she starts. “Oh. You are. Awake, I mean.” 

He watches her pace the room. She stops in front of the radiator, retrieves one of the thin hospital blankets, and drapes it over him. It’s warm from the heater and she tucks it around his shoulders and he thinks he must be dying, because that’s the only reason a cop would be nice to him. They haven’t even bothered to cuff him. “Better?” she asks, not waiting for a response. “Your friend said it would help.”

Which is how he finds out that Wrench is alive. Before he can think better of it, he tries to sit up. White-hot agony spears through his back and he screams, there’s fire, burning raw in his throat, but the only sound that comes out is a choked gurgle, and that’s how he finds out he’ll never speak again.

“Try to rest,” she says, absently; it comes off more like the kind of automatic thing you say to a dying guy than actual warmth. At best, he’s a witness; more likely, he’s a suspect, and no matter how gentle her tone, she’s here to question him. 

They’re both in for a disappointment, then. He stabs the morphine pump, over and over, waiting for it to kick in and obliterate him.

Her eyes are giant pools of pity and he cringes from it, even as her fingers brush softly over his temple. He’d tear her fucking hand off with his teeth if he could but instead he just lies there, helpless and eviscerated, pinned to the bed like someone’s sick specimen behind glass and this is far, far worse than being unconscious.

“Can I get you anything?” she asks. 

He can feel the drug wrapping around him, enveloping him in darkness, and somewhere between awareness and sleep, he finds the strength to bring his hands together to form Wrench’s name.

“Sorry,” she says, after a hesitation. Sorry that she doesn’t understand what he’s asking for, or sorry that she can’t give it to him? Then she folds a hand over his, and he knows it’s the latter. He jerks free and his back lights up with agony in response, but it’s worth it. She looks hurt, and he wonders what, exactly, she thinks he _is._ _Serves you right,_ he thinks bitterly. She’s lucky to have just been insulted, lucky that he’s lying there like a piece of butchered meat, too shattered to fight. People have suffered far worse for trying to get close to him.

The cop—plucky creature that she is—seems undeterred, though. She’s got a little notebook, the kind that’s recorded numerous incidents in his troubled youth, and she rips out one of the pages. “He wanted me to give you this.”

His breath catches high in his chest; it’s as much effort to keep his expression blank as it is to hold the paper just above his face. He sniffs. It doesn’t smell like Wrench—or like anything, above the sting of antiseptic that permeates the ward—but it’s unmistakably the tall, messy loops of his handwriting. 

_You were right._

He exhales past the oxygen tubes and half-closes his eyes, rolling the paper between his finger and thumb until there’s a smudge of blue and he makes himself stop because it’s all he has of Wrench, maybe all he’ll ever have again. He’s shaking. He grits his teeth, willing himself to stop.

“Do you want me to tell him something?”

The sound that comes out of him is a keening whine, squeakier than he remembers his lost voice being. He takes the notepad and pen from her. Even that slight movement all but breaks him, aftershocks of pain jittering up the muscles of his shoulders and spine.

The fuck can he say, anyway? Nothing that he’d like a cop to read. _I miss you_ or _I’m so glad you’re alive_ or _I wish you were sucking my dick right now_ —he contemplates writing the last one, actually, just for the look on her face—and settles for _I always am, you dumb shit._ His writing trails off at the end, a combination of the drugs finally kicking in and the weakness in his arm. 

She raises an eyebrow but just says, “I’ll come back later to see how you’re holdin’ up, okay?” He ignores her, isn’t even aware of her leaving the room, just clutches the note from Wrench as tight as he can to his chest until sleep comes to deliver him again.

* * *

The deaf fella stares at first when Molly gives him the note, rubs the heel of his hand against his hairline and smirks. 

“Now you two got me passin’ love letters for you.” It’s easier, too easy, to slide into the chair beside his bed, into casual conversation as though they were friends. Gus’s warning rings in her ears. Killer or not, he seems happy to see her, the hard evidence that his partner is still alive bringing a hint of color to his pale face.

They’ve taken to trading the notepad back and forth; she doesn’t want to lose anything he has to say to the whiteboard eraser. He writes, _How is he?_  

“Awake.” There’s no point in lying; she doesn’t have the kind of face that can lie. “Kinda groggy, y’know. They got him sedated. He can’t speak. That’s probably permanent, the rest…” She can feel his eyes on her, studying her. “He’s responsive now, so, uh, it’s way better than it could be. Gus thought he was dead when we found him, so.”

He sighs and makes a gesture that, even without any knowledge of ASL, she can pretty much figure out. “I know,” she says, and pets his hand. “When my dad got shot, I didn’t—I know it’s scary, is all. You wanna be with him. It’s only natural.”

She wishes she could give him that much. Truth is, she’s been breaking her heart over him. It doesn’t seem fair that Malvo slipped through her net, that Lester did, and her strange, silent ally is cornered like an injured fox in a trap. He might be no better than them but he’s no worse either, and criminal though he is, she can’t help but think of him as a little lost boy, despite his size and profession.

“We need to get Malvo,” she says. “That’s the only thing we can do about this. You understand?”

He swallows and nods. _What do you want?_ he writes.

“Anything. Anything at all.”

_Why was Malvo in Duluth?_  

“Another job?”

_Finished?_  

She runs the crime scene—relayed to her in scattered fragments from Gus, who isn’t even directly involved with the investigation—over in her head. There’s one dead civilian and two dead cops, none of who appear to have any sort of mob connection. “What about Stavros Milos? The car coulda been stolen, but maybe Malvo was working for him, or maybe Milos was the target.” 

He puts a hand to his head, then twists it outwards, a sign that she’s irritatingly familiar with by now.

“But it could be. Okay. We can follow up on that. Far’s we know, no one with any money or connections is dead, and he’s gotta be getting a paycheck from somewhere.”

The deaf fella glances at the notepad, then up at her, his eyes wide. Deliberately, staring at her and not the page, he writes: _What if he’s doing it for fun?_  

Her dad had called it savagery, and she thinks that’s a good enough word for now. All she knows is Lorne Malvo, the unassuming reverend from Baudette, is something so utterly scary that this man, six-foot-something of solid muscle, this assassin with innumerable corpses to his name, is terrified of him. She shivers.

_He’s still in Duluth,_ the deaf fella writes, and she has to agree. _He’s not done yet._

“There’s a guard,” she says quickly, “24 hours, just outside—” 

His weird, soundless laugh is more like a snarl. As though the Duluth PD can protect him or his partner if Malvo decides to finish the job. As though anyone can.

Still, she has the sketches of a plan now—lean on Milos, see if she can get him to crack—which means getting herself discharged. She’s probably at the end of what the deaf fella knows anyway, much as she doesn’t want to leave him alone with Malvo on the loose. She takes his hand again and tells him, “You’re safe, you’re safe…” 

Which is when Schmitt knocks on the door with a stern, “We need to talk.”

* * *

“Call from Bemidji,” Schmitt’s telling her. “The Weiders were out ice-fishing this morning. You know them?”

“Stan Weider, runs the hardware store. Two little boys.”

“That’s the one,” Schmitt says. “So. You’ll never guess what they caught.”

“I’m guessin’ not a fish.”

“Not a fish.”

“Body?”

“Lenny Mathiesen. Missin’ a few days ago, last seen exiting the Lucky Penny with two fellas who left quite the impression.”

Molly looks through the window. The deaf fella’s lying curled up on his side, his eyes closed and his face, younger and softer in sleep, framed in messy red-gold curls.  

“Congratulations,” Schmitt says, clapping her on the back. “He just became _your_ problem.”

Molly sighs and leans into the wall, suddenly weak on her feet.

“What’s the matter? You caught a bona fide killer, deputy, and you’re lookin’ like someone just ran over your puppy.”

She knows— _knew_ —Lenny; yeah, there wasn’t much there to like, but she can see him, blue beneath the ice, his corpse bloating with water, and just like that she’s doubled over, retching, and Schmitt first offers her an arm to steady her, then calls for a doctor.

They get her back into her room and on the IV to replenish her fluids and tell her she’s still too weak to be dealing with this all, clearly. Once the fuss has died down and the dizziness subsides, she follows the pathways she’s drawn on the window without the strength to get up and add one more name to her map.

She’d wanted to let the deaf fella go, she realizes, impossible as that was. She’d come to trust him a little. She’d _liked_ him, even. She’s not stupid; she knows he’s not a stray to be taken in, knows he was never anything like innocent.

Even now, she can’t make herself hate him. She hates Lenny a little instead, for getting himself murdered. It’s not fair, but none of this is. None of it’s fair to anyone.

In the end, she calls Gus. He answers on the fifth ring and she feels a stab of guilt for probably waking Greta, too.

“Hey,” he says, his voice thick with sleep.

“Hey yourself.”

“It’s 3 am.”

“I know. I’m sorry, I just needed—” _Solid ground._ That’s what he is: not a good cop, but a good man. He listens to her go on, interjecting in places with a, “yeah,” or “mmm-hmm”—but never, she notices, “I told you so”—before asking, “What’re you gonna do now, then?”

She stares out the window, holding her side. Outside, behind the trail of carnage sketched in whiteboard marker and supposition, past the translucent monument to the guilty and the dead, the sky is washed in indigo and charcoal. “It’s time,” she says softly. “I’m goin’ home.”


	6. ONE-UP-ON

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wrench tries to make a deal. Molly fails to go home.

She doesn’t leave, though. At least, she doesn’t leave right away.

When she turns her back on the upside-down snow globe netherworld of Duluth for the familiar reality of Bemidji, she’ll be a local hero. There will be a party welcoming her home. They will all joke about how she gunned down a giant armed with an assault rifle, laugh and clap each other on the back, and she’ll sit to the side like she always does, overlooked even in her blaze of heroism.

She will have admiration, but few friends. Only poor, brave Ida, who she can’t lean on, not with what’s happened, and Gus, who’s almost three hours away. Until now, Molly’s never realized how palpably lonely she is, how isolated.

There’ll be her dad, always her bedrock, whose warmth and laughter hides demons never properly put to rest. Unfaltering, unwavering, not like her. He’d never let himself get compromised like she has. He’d understand, but that’s kinda the problem.

Molly dresses in civvies that her dad had brought from home, a loose-fitting shirt and drawstring sweatpants that nevertheless chafe against her surgical scar. It hurts like heck just bending over to slide on socks and shoes, but she’s not about to ask for anyone’s help. She sits and waits for a time for her dad to plough through the bureaucracy of discharge papers and insurance claims. It must be taking hours; she manages to stop herself twice at the door before she gives in and walks down the long corridor to the deaf fella’s room. She’s unbalanced without the IV to lean on; her soles are nearly silent on the polished floor. Less than a week after the shootout, the hospital seems deserted, as if everyone’s up and left while she was sleeping. 

He’s still there, gripping the hem of the blanket in his fist like a child in the throes of a nightmare. Molly lets herself in and sits by him until he stirs.

“Why’d you do it?” she asks once his eyes open. “Lenny?” 

He makes a _who?_ gesture. 

“Lenny Mathiesen, back in Bemidji. They found the body. Froze to death, or drowned, or both, maybe. The last he was seen alive was with you. What’d he have to do with any of this?”

His eyes narrow, the color drained out of them in the cold afternoon light. He mimes writing, and she gives him the notepad. _Rude._

“That’s it? You just—”

 _Partner?_ When she doesn’t answer, he draws a thick black stroke beneath the word and writes, _Any better?_

“I didn’t see him,” she snaps, harsher than she’d intended, but what does it matter? Even if he could hear her, _he’s_ not the one under the delusion that they’re on the same side. He’s probably gloating at just how smoothly he’s managed to manipulate her into telling him everything she knows. “I’m going home,” she tells him. “Tonight. Soon as you’re able, they’ll transport you back into our custody.”

He blinks, his face betraying nothing. She’s almost decided that she spoke too quickly for him to understand when he picks up the pad and underlines _Partner_ a second time.

“Him too,” she says, though no one’s even brought up the subject. Probably, she thinks, no one assumed the partner would make it. “I guess. If he…”

A violent headshake. _Just my translator. Didn’t kill anyone._

“I don’t believe you.” It’d be laughable, how transparent a lie it is, if there wasn’t a death toll attached to it. If anything, the other fella had looked tougher, harder, what she could see of him covered in tattoos and scars older than the wounds in his throat and back. No way he was absent from the action.

He tries that lost puppy look on her again, but she’s steeled for it now; he’ll say anything, do anything, and she’s not fool enough to carry a scorpion on her back.

_He didn’t have a gun when you found him._

Molly stands up, blood rushing to her head. “See you at the trial,” she says. She’s about to take the notepad from him when his hand shoots out and grabs her by the wrist, his grip pure iron. He could crush her bones between his fingers if he wanted to.

“Please,” he says.

She freezes at the sound of his voice, thick and unwieldy on his tongue. He says it again, as if testing out the word, unsure if he’s been understood. He scrawls, frantic: _This is bigger than Malvo. I know a lot more._

“What?” she asks, as if she hasn’t already fallen into it, as if the net of names and connections mapped on the window hasn’t already swallowed her whole.

_Partner goes free. Witness protection. Talk to FBI._

She can hear the ragged puffs of his breath, his chest heaving as though he’s run a mile. Whatever else he is, Molly doesn’t believe his concern for his partner, his frantic desperation, is faked. He as good as confessed to Lenny’s murder quickly enough. Mostly he looks exhausted, like he just wants to be done with it all. He knows he’s condemned, but he believes—really, truly believes, and how do you get to be a hit man with no knowledge about how the law works?—that his partner will get to walk away somehow.

“Not too sure I can make that happen,” she says slowly, but she doesn’t leave, doesn’t even try to pull away. Two can play at manipulation as well as one. “In exchange for what?”

 _Everything,_ he writes, then: _I’ll give you Fargo._

* * *

Molly stays one more night in Duluth after all. 

She starts out on Gus’s sofa. He’s put out the guest sheets and everything, floral patterned, faded, and Molly wonders if his dead wife picked them out. Her dad’s snoring away on an air mattress a few feet away, peaceful enough even with the change in plans, but she can’t stay still. Her side hurts and her brain is spinning. She pads, barefoot, the floor cold beneath her soles, to the apartment’s small kitchen to root through the fridge. It’s been a number of years since she’s been in a man’s kitchen—a very large number of years—and she’s startled to find it orderly and well-stocked, with nothing that smells past its expiry date. Maybe Greta keeps him in line. She pours herself a glass of orange juice and sits down at the table, bare but for a small stack of unopened bills. 

“Couldn’t sleep either?”

She startles, more accustomed to silence than she’d thought. “Keep thinkin’ that this is, like, a career-making thing. Sorta thing that only happens once. I just don’t wanna, y’know, screw it up.” On edge, she smoothes back her hair; it’s not right to be confiding this in him, not when he’s likely to lose his badge over her.

“You won’t.” His eyes, wide and guileless, catch the light from the apartment building across the street, kitchen and bedrooms winking in and out as their inhabitants move from one room to another. He leans across the table at her and she thinks he’s going to take her hands, but instead he pours himself some of the orange juice. “You’re amazing, Molly, you’ve been bang-on about everything, even when it’s like the whole world’s against you. I’ve never…” He ducks his head, staring into his glass. “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

She swallows hard, glad that the darkness hides her blush. Her amusement at the flowers, at his nervous demeanor and the way his ears stick out a bit, has somehow turned, glacially but inevitably, into a fluttery tangle of affection in the pit of her stomach.

“We’re doin’ this,” she says. “We’re actually gonna take down the _mob_.”

Gus laughs. He has a nice laugh, she thinks. There’s a lot that’s nice about him, really.

“Well,” he says. “ _You_ are. I’m gonna be job-hunting.”

“Gus,” she starts, without knowing how to end, but he ends it for her, sliding around the table to cup her chin.

“This is where we’re goin’, right?”

His mouth, warm and pliant against hers, tastes a little of citrus, and his lips part when she presses closer, their knees touching below the corner of the table. She touches his hair, the back of his neck; he mirrors her own explorations, two kids fumbling, clumsy and cold and fascinated, in the dark. He’s not the sort of fella who kisses a girl breathless. And yet.

 _Please,_ she thinks, _just this once, let it all be okay._

“Yeah,” Molly says. “Looks like.”

Guest sheets or not, she doesn’t end the night on the sofa after all.

* * *

It ends like it started, on the way back to Fargo to pick up their next assignment, Wrench cleaning and oiling the guns, tense and focused like he always gets between jobs, on a duvet stained with innumerable relics of previous guests, and Numbers bitching at him the whole time. They’ve been dancing around the same conversation, in safe houses and motel rooms and shitty diners, for fifteen years.

The south end of the winter storm bearing down from Manitoba howls outside the window, rattling the glass. Numbers is cranky, under slept and underfed, the way _he_ always gets when he’s not either killing or fucking. He’s complained the entire drive that they left too late, stopped too often, and now they’re stuck in another shitstain motel for the night, and Wrench cheerfully deflects him. He likes the monotony of cheap motels, the ugly oil paintings, the two twin beds always laid out in precisely the same configuration, even likes the predictability of his partner’s irritation. There had been few constants in his life before Fargo. Now, it might as well be the same room every night, and that feels almost like home.

 _Stop that,_ Numbers signs.

Wrench gestures, _what?_ Numbers stalks over to the bed, takes the assault rifle out of his hands, and places it back in the duffel bag with the rest of them.

_How many guns does one guy need? You only have two hands._

_Bored?_ Wrench asks, then, _Horny?_ After all these years, after all the times Numbers tried to end it and changed his mind, they still fuck like it’s the first time, and that’s generally enough to drag his partner out of his ennui. Wrench wipes his greasy palms on the duvet—Numbers scowls at this, like that’s actually going to make the room any worse—and lays a hand on his thigh.

His mouth pursing, Numbers signs, _Rather be somewhere warm. With decent beer on tap._

Wrench reluctantly picks up his hand again. _Could stop somewhere on the way. Ever go ice fishing?_

 _What about me makes you think I would want to go ice fishing?_ He shivers for emphasis, pulling on the ends of the scarf he hasn’t taken off even though the heat’s on full blast.

 _Like dumping bodies but ends tastier._ That almost— _almost_ —gets him a laugh. _Could warm you up after. You’d like it._

Numbers shoves him. _Knock it off._

_I mean it. We should go somewhere._

_We don’t take fucking vacations._

It’s meant to hurt, and it does, even if it’s just a thing Numbers says to reassure himself that this isn’t a relationship—though they’ve been on-and-off, but mostly on, longer than most marriages—to remind himself that one or both of them might die horribly at any given moment. Maybe a part of him likes the sameness of it all as much as Wrench does, the stretches of identical strip malls and snow-dusted highway, the half-full jar of mustard in a fridge in the apartment that’s been on the top shelf, untouched, since they moved in together. Maybe he wants—needs—to be frozen.

 _Fucking Fargo,_ Wrench says, because it’s what his partner wants to hear. Numbers looks tired, not that he doesn’t always, but it’s been worse lately, the bags under his eyes heavier, his reflexes, when they’re on the job, slower than they used to be. Fargo hasn’t yet noticed that his heart isn’t in it like it once was, but his bosses aren’t the ones who see him every day. Wrench doesn’t know how old he is now—like Numbers’ real name and the reasons why he grows wistful sometimes at songs on the car radio that Wrench can’t hear, that information is a buried mine best left undetonated—but he’s fifteen years older than he was when they started working together, and it has to be catching up with him.

 _Get used to it,_ Numbers tells him, as though it’s something new, as if Wrench didn’t know, hadn’t always known. _We’re not riding off into the sunset. Stop talking like we can._

Wrench strokes his cheek, which he pretends to hate, and kisses the tip of his nose, which he pretends to hate even more. _I don’t talk, dumbass,_ he signs. _I like doing this. I’m good at it._ He lets his hands fall a moment. It’s late, far too late, for harsh truths, and he should know better than to expect love from someone whose job it is to inflict suffering.

Still, Wrench tells him: _You’re the one who always brings up leaving._

The little muscles in his jaw contract so hard that the movement is visible through his thick beard. His entire body is a line of tension, from the set of his shoulders to the tendons in hands clawing into his knees, and Wrench braces himself for an attack. He’s hit too hard, this time, too close to something already fatally damaged.

Instead, Numbers slumps, the fight bled out of him in the space between one breath and the next. _They wouldn’t let us just go._

It’s true, but Wrench can’t hate them for it, not like Numbers does. Yeah, sure, he hates them on a personal level, because they’re assholes—but he’s not ungrateful.

They gave him Numbers, after all. Who—grumpy and hirsute and a relentless complainer—was never his type, who is prickly and stubborn and without whom he’d be dead a thousand times over. The one good thing, the very _best_ thing.

_We could go anyway._

_They’d find us._

_How is that any different from now?_

Numbers turns to look up at him. _Thought you liked killing people._

_I could like something else. Live off the grid. Get chickens._

_I’m not moving to the middle of fucking nowhere with you._ He scrubs his fingers through his hair, frowning. There’s a few strands of grey in it now. Wrench thinks it makes him look distinguished, but he’s caught his partner plucking them out in front of a mirror a few times.

 _After this next job’s done,_ Numbers says, resigned, the way he usually isn’t when they’re sober and on the clock. _We can talk about it then._

Out loud, Wrench sees his lips say something that he’s pretty sure is, “Fucking chickens,” and he knows that after all this, years of wearing each other down like stones in a riverbed, after every time Numbers has coldly declared them irrevocably over and come slinking back, stinking of booze, days later, he knows that when his partner dreams of that elusive, forbidden _after_ , he’s imagining Wrench there at his side.

Wrench has always loved his partner effortlessly, and without ambivalence—but Numbers is the one who can’t go on without him. If Wrench’s feelings overstretch Numbers’ clearly delineated boundaries, it’s only because Numbers needs his love more than the other way around.

That settled, he stretches out his long legs over the hideous duvet. He reaches for the crumpled map that he can’t seem to get folded back like it was originally, and signs, _So, what the fuck do we know about this Hess guy anyway?_

* * *

Okay, so, neither of them gets that particular _after_.  

Wrench has had a few hours to get used to the idea, between bouts of drug-induced sleep, while waiting for Molly to return, and he’s come around to a kind of acceptance. They don’t get to be together, but he can still protect Numbers the way his partner protected him all these years, and if he has to rot in a prison cell, at least it’s not for nothing.

He should have told Molly that they needed to send Numbers somewhere that didn’t get as cold as North Dakota. He won’t be happy, but maybe he can be less miserable. She can keep tabs on him, make sure he’s eating something that doesn’t come out of a chip bag. In time, maybe he’d even meet someone else who can pry open the walls of his fortress enough to admit a little light. 

And Wrench has done time before, a stretch in juvy when he was 16. It won’t be that bad. He’s good with his tongue, and he’s big; the former ensures he’ll always have friends and the latter means he can deal with his enemies. 

He can live with it.

He turns his head to the window.

“Never heard of a deaf hit man,” Lorne Malvo says, grinning wolfishly back at him.


	7. BLOW-UP-IN-FACE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything goes wrong, until it doesn't.

Malvo rolls out his words, slow and explicit, ensuring Wrench catches every syllable of his ramblings about glass eyes and trapped bears. Wrench thrashes against the handcuffs, gasping at the pain the movement awakes in his chest and belly, but determined nevertheless to rip himself free and crush Malvo’s windpipe in his fist so that his last screams, when he carves the bastard’s blackened heart out, are as silent as Numbers’ must have been. 

Malvo just smiles at him, his pointed eyebrows dancing as he toys with the whiteboard in his hands. 

“You’re unemployed now, by the way,” he says, “in case you don’t read the papers.” Wrench shouts wordlessly at him, for what he’s taken. He’s got no affection for the syndicate beyond the debt he’ll always owe them, but Fargo was his last hand, his one chance to get Numbers to safety. With them slaughtered—did Malvo kill all of them on his own? How could any one person manage that?—he has no currency to barter for his partner’s freedom. 

He flops back, wounds throbbing, and studies every fine crease and wrinkle in the man’s face, engraving it in his memory. The bright morning fills the window and casts him in darkness. He stands; Wrench wonders if he’s going in for the kill, thinks, _you’d better do it, or I’ll find you. However long it takes, I’ll find you._

But Malvo’s smarter than that, has to be, to have taken Numbers down. Like any hit man, he is an apt student of human nature. 

He dangles the key in front of Wrench’s eyes.

“You probably want to kill me,” he says. “Here’s how that will go. If you get up before I leave the room, I’ll blow a few more holes in you and the cops will be on both of us. We both go down that way, if that’s how you want to play it.” He lifts the flap of his coat to reveal the flash of metal below. “Or, you can save yourself. Maybe, if you’re fast enough, you can even save what’s left of your partner down the hall before I finish what I started.”

He mimes dropping the key, once, twice, before he actually does it. Wrench snatches it in his fist, twists so he can reach the handcuffs. Malvo’s face is just above his, close enough that he can smell the saccharine rot of the man’s breakfast. 

“I’m thinking,” Malvo adds, “that you’ll go for the less interesting choice. But either way, I can’t wait to find out.”

Wrench seethes, he hates as he’s never hated, but he lies obediently, every molecule in his body straining to be free, until he sees the door swing shut behind Malvo’s back. Only then does he turn the key and, pushing against the crushing weight of his pain, staggers to his feet.

* * *

Molly is only thirteen minutes too late. 

She knows something’s wrong when she goes to question the deaf fella and there’s no guard at his door. Her palm is slick with sweat on the doorknob. She already knows what she’ll find inside. The open handcuffs are still clattering against the bed’s railing.

Gus clutches her arm, ready to valiantly throw himself between her and some unseen enemy, but she just says, “Check the washroom.” She doesn’t see a body; there’s a chance, however remote, that the guard could still be alive. 

“Where are you—”

She stumbles in an approximation of a run, her left leg a dead weight behind her. She doesn’t have a gun, she’s in no shape to fight, and she doesn’t even have a plan for how she’s supposed to stop him. Still, she hauls herself, broken and unwieldy, until she reaches the ICU. 

The deaf fella’s there, at the eye of the hurricane, and even folded over in pain, he’s so much taller than he’d looked lying in bed. He limps past the nurses’ station, oblivious to the whirlwind of white coats around him.

One of the nurses pulls Molly aside with a hushed, “Ma’am, we can’t let—” but she raises a finger to her lips and points. The other woman gapes in response, and Molly slides past her, stalking between beds and monitors, towards where he’s standing.

Molly’s sure that the deaf fella has caught her intrusion, is waiting to ambush her behind the blue curtain cordoning off his partner’s bed, but he’s unmoving, focused, as far as she can tell, on running his finger up and down his partner’s tattooed collarbone. It’s such a weird, almost tender gesture that she stops, her hand halfway to a gun that’s not at her side, before she sees the dark, hooded eyes of the man on the bed open to meet hers, and the deaf fella whirls around and yanks Molly against his chest, one elbow crooked around her throat.

The needle bites into the side of her neck, and her vision goes fuzzy, her legs rubbery. He takes two long steps to a chair, dragging her after him, and sits her down. He lifts an errant strand of hair from her forehead and pushes it behind her ear. He makes a fist with his right hand and brings it up to his chest, circling it a few times.

“I don’t un…” she starts, and he bends down and kisses the top of her head, the last thing she feels before she slumps, boneless, into the chair.

* * *

Numbers has dreamt of little else but Wrench since nearly bleeding out in the snow beside him, so when he opens his eyes, it takes him a second to realize he’s actually awake. The cop trying to sneak up on his partner snaps him into alertness; as Wrench takes her out, he looks up to see his heart rate jump on the monitor. 

Depositing the unconscious woman a safe distance away, Wrench is back at his side, without missing a beat, disconnecting the IV lines in his arm, slipping the nasal cannula from his face, unlatching the cuff around his arm and the clip on his finger.

The monitors, severed from his heartbeat, shriek. Wrench has been seen as well as heard—by the door, Numbers can see one of the nurses pointing them out to the young cop assigned to guard him. He rolls his eyes in their direction and Wrench moves, far more quietly than a man of his size should be able to, behind the curtain.

The cop is almost on top of them before Wrench lashes out and whips the curtain around him, seizing on his immobility to yank the gun out of the holster. The kid straightens just long enough for Wrench to blast a hole in his kneecap and kick him across the polished floor. He turns back to Numbers, puts the gun down by his hand, and tugs the heart monitor leads from his chest.

 _What are you doing?_ Numbers signs over the man’s wails, the commotion of nurses trying to keep him alive, the controlled chaos of the ICU spiraling, in an instant, beyond anyone’s control.

Wrench grins. _Rescuing you._

Numbers has been staring up at those stupid sideburns for fifteen years. He’s backlit by the overhead fluorescents, the tips of his curls glinting copper bright, the hospital gown sticking to his chest in a patch of red where he’s no doubt done something as medically irresponsible to himself as he’s doing to Numbers. He’s so fucking beautiful, and Numbers has never been more goddamned grateful to see anyone in his life.

Wrench slides one arm behind his neck, the other below his knees, and lifts him into a waiting wheelchair. He places the cop’s gun in Numbers’ hands with the silent understanding that this time they show no mercy, allow no benefit of the doubt, that this time, they kill anything that stands between them and escape.

Numbers isn’t sure his hands are steady enough to get off a good shot, but he doesn’t need to. Everyone’s racing to take care of the two fallen cops; Wrench wheels him into a supply closet off the hallway outside and waits for the emergency to pass them by. He pants for breath, his besieged lungs tight and his heart racing, as Wrench slides to the floor beside him, wheezing even harder. Numbers manages to turn his head just enough to make eye contact.

Wrench taps his hand to his chest— _Mine—_ and smiles beatifically at him.

 _Don’t get sentimental on me,_ Numbers signs back. _Just get us the fuck out of here._

* * *

They switch cars three times between Duluth and St. Paul and the drive takes longer than it should, over country roads and through grey slashes of barren trees, stark against the pristine snow. The storm covers their tracks and deters pursuit, but Wrench is on edge, the pain of his wounds no doubt breaking through the morphine delirium and adrenaline that’s somehow kept him running all this time. 

Numbers, curled against the side door and writhing under the blanket Wrench has wrapped him in, signs, _Keep driving,_ the blaring radio covering the reed-thin squeak of his own strangled cries. He cringes with every pothole and swerve. Wrench keeps darting glances his way, like he’s convinced Numbers is going to die or disappear any second, sometimes taking a hand off the wheel to squeeze his knee, and Numbers tells himself that the flutter in his gut at that is just the drugs wearing off. 

It was too close; he’d dropped his guard—or, more accurately, Wrench stomped the shit out of his carefully built defences, then set fire to the remains—and he’d almost lost everything as a result.

Their safe house—the first of many to come—is an apartment in a condo that’s been sitting at half-occupancy for years: bland, barely furnished, with off-white walls and a lonely television set in front of the bed. Numbers watches Wrench, white-faced and hunched with his arm held against his chest, turn on the TV and check exits and sightlines and locate the stash of first aid supplies in the bathroom.

He holds himself together long enough for them both to swallow pills, until he can sit Wrench down and peel back the bloody squares of gauze on his torso. It’s not a pretty sight, and he’s not even sure who he needs to strangle in revenge, besides his uncharacteristically reckless partner who’s torn half of his sutures while escaping, besides himself for needing to be rescued at all. He signs, _You’re a fucking idiot,_ and gets to work on stitching the wounds closed. Wrench is so accustomed to bashing himself up and getting sewn back together that he barely makes a sound, but Numbers can barely keep his hands still enough to sew stitches that won’t leave him looking like the Elephant Man.

Only when the place is secure and he’s convinced Wrench isn’t going to bleed to death and the percs have kicked in enough is he able to think about anything beyond his own pain that the grief surfaces and he collapses in on himself. Numbers had the ability to cry thoroughly beaten out of him in childhood, and even now he can’t quite manage it, too dehydrated for tears to come. His choked-out sobs at everything Malvo’s stolen from him, for his career and his freedom and his voice, are parched and soundless and all the worse for that, and he lies face-down on the bed, glad that Wrench can’t hear how pathetic he is.

He’s dying; his breath is hitched and rapid and everything hurts. Even if he survives this, the life he knows is over. They’re on the news, in photos so grim and badly lit that they might as well be mug shots; Fargo’s on the news, twenty-two people gunned down in a shower of blood and lead and glass, steaming shitbags each and every one of them, but the only family he’s ever had, the only job he’s ever worked, the only means he has to keep himself and his partner safe. He’s finished, hunted and maimed and without purpose. He’s never liked being an instrument of destruction, not the way Wrench does, but it’s better than being a tool that’s been broken beyond repair or use.

The bed sinks beside him and gently, as though he’s somehow capable of crumbling further than he already has, Wrench rolls him onto his side. Their faces are so close that they’re almost touching, and then his partner—who has always understood Numbers’ heart better than he does himself—places a broad palm against his chest. Numbers hesitates, then does the same in response, his finger just barely touching the bandage there, and he breathes, as evenly as he can manage through his damaged throat, until his own pulse climbs down from its panicked frenzy. Wrench’s heartbeat is steady against his hand, his skin warm like he’s been lying in the sun all day, and he still has something, he still has _this,_ even if the end is closing in on them both. 

When he’s calmer, Wrench lifts his hand and strokes Numbers’ hair, his beard, rubs the tension out of the back of his neck, and Numbers settles into the bed and lets his partner’s huge hands ghost over his skin. Slowly, his every nerve flayed, his joints rusted stiff, he reciprocates, tracing his fingertips over the outlines of muscle and bumps of scar tissue, reacquainting himself with what he almost lost. Wrench has always been tactile, far more than Numbers has ever felt comfortable with, but they’ve never done anything like this in their years together, never just lay exploring the planes of each other's skin, like they had all the time in the world. He’d never have allowed it, won’t ever allow it again. Probably the drugs, he decides, the pain, turning him soft.

Clearly emboldened, Wrench kisses the underside of his jaw, leans back, and signs, _I’m sorry about your voice. You had a nice voice. Reassuring._

_How would you know?_

_Other people’s reactions._  

He snorts. He likes to think that he sounded terrifying, but he’s pretty sure that isn’t the case.

 _I can still talk to you,_ he signs back, and doesn’t add that Wrench is the only person he’s ever met worth talking to anyway. Wrench picks up his hand and kisses his fingers, one by one, and he almost pulls away, to turn it into a joke or just tell him to fuck off with his sappy bullshit, except he’s been fighting for so long, and he’s so terribly tired.

Wrench just watches him, stares like there’s something he’s waiting for, and when he’s decided he’s found it, lets his face harden into the mask it becomes before they head out on a job. _Ready?_ He isn’t, not by a long shot, but he nods anyway.

Everyone who’s ever met them thinks that Numbers is the brains and Wrench is the muscle, but truth is that Numbers is just a loudmouth, and that’s been taken away from him, so Wrench does all the planning and Numbers is too consumed with pain and fear to do anything but agree. 

The plan’s to hit a series of drops, safe houses, and emergency bank accounts spread out across the Midwest. They need to move quickly, life-threatening injuries or not; any other surviving syndicate assets—and, Numbers thinks, there might be dozens—will be thinking the same thing, racing the cops and the FBI to snatch up the evidence before it’s lost to a full-scale investigation. They can empty out this particular apartment, stocked under the assumption that anyone taking refuge there is flat broke and bleeding, try the strip mall across the street for clothes that fit better than the questionable track pants and sweatshirts in the bedroom’s drawers, fish antibiotics from the pet store, heroin from the scabbed-up mouth-breathers lurking outside.

From there, Wrench figures, they take everything of the syndicate’s that they can get their hands on, and keep running.

The important thing is that there is an after. Wrench is talking shit, they both know it, but as long as he’s still talking, as long as they keep moving, Numbers tells himself, they can outrun the shockwaves of Malvo’s devastation. There’s a plan, there’s momentum, and so they’re not dead. 

Still, because broken-down though he is, they’ve never made him stop being able to want more than he’s entitled to have, he asks: _And after?_

Wrench hugs him, and he just lets it happen, lets himself be gathered up and held for awhile. As if it’s that easy, as if none of it, the money and the false identities and their blood-soaked past can just be erased, folded away and left on a shelf somewhere, leaving them clean and blameless and free.

_You’re thinking about the fucking chicken farm again, aren’t you?_

_Yeah,_ Wrench tells him. _You’d look cute in a straw hat and overalls._

_If I wasn’t hacked up to shit I’d kick your fucking ass._

Wrench turns over on his side, and there are a few minutes of awkward shuffling while they both determine how to lie down so that they’re not aggravating anything unbearably painful and are still in as much contact with each other’s skin as possible, still gazing into each other’s eyes like they’re love-struck teenagers on their first date and not formerly the two most deadly weapons in Fargo’s arsenal. 

 _Tomorrow,_ Wrench signs, and Numbers, the thought of promising him anything still a strange and disorienting prospect, signs it back.

* * *

Molly doesn’t sleep through any of the drive back to Bemidji. She leans her face against the cold glass and watches the road sweep past them, the wet thud of the snow smeared across the windshield.

When she'd woken up, Gus told her about the Fargo massacre. He didn’t need to tell her that the deaf fella and his partner had escaped the clutches of the Duluth PD; they’d have never tried anything that brazen if they didn’t think they could get out. One dead cop, strangled in the bathroom like she’d feared, another crippled, Malvo’s face all over the CCTV tapes as if to mock her. He’d unleashed hell and stood back, just far enough away to watch, as her entire case burned to the ground.

An hour before she was finally released, Bill had called up to tell her the good news about Chazz Nygaard, and she’d gone still as the dead until her father bundled her into the car, away from it all. 

“No,” she says, again and again, “no, this is wrong.” 

“I know that, sweetheart. But you’re alive to fight another day.”

Her dad’s face is blue in the dying light of a cold dusk. She thinks, his hair wasn’t so thin before, the lines gouged in his face weren’t so deep. “He coulda killed me,” she whispers. “He coulda, and he didn’t. Why didn’t he?” 

“Got no clue,” he says. “Alls I’m sayin’ is I’m glad he didn’t. You hang onto that, and you make something of it. You come out stronger.”

“And then?”

He whistles softly into the darkness, and she knows the answers to questions she never asked him, all about the fight he survived but lost. He’s not a man to dwell on the past, not even now.

“And then,” Lou Solverson says, “then you win.”


	8. FISH

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Molly gets a lead. Numbers gets a horribly cheesy tattoo. Everyone, as it turns out, gets their man.

Winter stutters to an end eventually, even in Minnesota. 

Wrench idly pushes bits of pancake through puddles of maple syrup, his attention caught between the flakes of snow outside the window, melting before they touch the ground, and Numbers, who—having been dragged from shitty diner to shitty diner for the past two months—is consoling himself by attacking a veritable mountain of bacon.

Numbers puts his fork down for long enough to sign an aggravated, _What?_  

_You are the worst Jew._

That gets him an upraised middle finger. _I’m anemic._ Which he is, but Wrench isn’t sure that bacon is all that high in iron. _What did I say about watching people when they eat?_

Truth be told, Wrench would just as soon never do anything for the rest of his life _but_ watch his partner devour bacon and then get ragged out for staring at him. Numbers looks a little better these days, and it’s still cold enough for him to be able to hide the ugly band of red across his throat under scarves and turtlenecks, but he’s jumpy and paranoid and he tires easily, and so any sign of life from him, even bickering, _especially_ bickering, is enough to make Wrench’s day. 

 _You almost died,_ Wrench signs. _I can stare where I like._

Numbers sniffs at him, scowls, and then one of his hands disappears under the table to rest on top of Wrench’s knee. Wrench reaches for his hand and threads their fingers together, and Numbers circles his thumb over Wrench’s palm instead of pulling away to say something dismissive.

Well, this is new.

He’s been a bit more openly affectionate lately, though this is the first time he’s gone so far as to actually let Wrench touch him in public. When they’re alone, he fusses over his partner’s healing injuries and plays with his hair as he drifts off to sleep at night, even if one hand is always poised to grab the gun and blow away anything that comes through the door. Wrench would unequivocally enjoy this development if it didn’t make him worry about his partner’s mental state. Numbers is a man so aloof that he once tattooed his emotional unavailability across his chest. It takes serious trauma to go from that to holding hands in a Buttfuck, Nowhere, diner brimming with rednecks who’d no doubt like to take a swing at a couple of queers. 

They’ve crisscrossed five states and no one’s come after them, at least no one that matters. Malvo is still out there, and Molly, and the FBI task force assigned to the Fargo case, but none of them can be looking that hard. Wrench and Numbers keep a low profile but there’s only so inconspicuous a 6’4 deaf ginger can be. After two months, he’s starting to relax. Maybe they’re actually safe.

Which doesn’t mean he wants to be here, any more than Numbers does. If he had his way, they’d be halfway to New Mexico by now, where there’s an old client who owes him a favor and the upstairs of a garage where they can crash for practically nothing as long as they’re willing to work security for the owner’s less legal business deals from time to time. It’s not exactly an idyllic retirement, but compared to all the might-have-beens, he’s looking forward to living an incrementally more peaceful life.

There are just a few loose ends to tie up first.

* * *

Molly’s cutting up sandwiches for lunch when there’s a knock on her door. 

“Comin’!” She’s not expecting anyone, and Gus—out picking up wine for tonight—wouldn’t knock, polite as he is, at this point in the relationship, not after the last trip to the doctor’s. On Sunday, before he and Greta drive back to Duluth, they’re supposed to be looking at houses.

Still, it’s been so quiet that when she opens the door and sees _him_ there, his gigantic shadow falling over the threshold like something out of a primordial nightmare, well, it’s a shock is what it is.

For a wanted criminal, he’s made no attempt to disguise himself beyond finding a less distinctively absurd jacket, but then again, there wouldn’t be much of a point, would there be? She takes a step backwards, calculates the location of her gun—upstairs, locked up, out of immediate reach. Where Greta is sprawled out on the floor of the guest bedroom, doing her homework. 

The girl in question emerges from the staircase, crowding behind her to get a good look. “Hey, Molly, is that—”

Molly turns so he can’t see her lips and whispers, “Out the back door, _now._ ” 

“But—”

Molly moves to stand directly in front of the man; he’ll have to go through her to get to Greta, and that’ll buy the girl some time to get to a neighbor’s house. He just smirks, as if her protectiveness is funny. Maybe it is to someone like him. He could kill her and Greta in the space it takes the girl to reach the kitchen. Besides, Greta doesn’t run; she edges for the closet, where there’s a baseball bat behind the coats. 

“Are you here to kill me?” Molly asks. As soon as the words are out of her mouth, the fear drains away. She’d almost killed him, after all—she can hardly blame him for wanting to even the score. But there’s a kind of relief in knowing that no matter whether she puts up a fight or not, the outcome’s the same.

He looks genuinely offended at the suggestion, and shakes his head. To drive home the point, he lifts both of his hands. There’s a thick file folder in one and nothing in the other, as if being unarmed makes him any less dangerous. Greta reaches for the edge of the closet’s sliding door, and Molly hisses, “Don’t,” shooing her back towards the kitchen.

“Do, uh, do you want to come in, then?” She asks, her afternoon having taken a turn for the decidedly surreal. She tries to picture him sitting at the big oak dining table, sharing the sandwiches with her and Greta and Gus, like he’s just the kind of regular person she keeps fooling herself into thinking he is. 

He spares her that mental picture with another headshake, and hands her the folder. She has a good guess what it’ll be before she opens it to the first page—photocopied police reports, annotated in his looping handwriting, then more, stills from surveillance camera footage, restaurant receipts, bar tabs.

A business card with an address from a dental clinic in Missouri. Photos, showing Malvo leaving the clinic, silver-haired and smiling, a pretty blonde hanging off his arm.

Molly puts the folder on the hall table, hovering near it lest it vanish once it’s left her field of vision. “How did you get this? You been… _following_ him?” It’s absurd, but the footage from the hospital tells a strange and twisted story. It was Malvo, not some friendlier accomplice, who strangled the cop in the bathroom and let the deaf fella loose. She’d almost think they were working together this whole time, but it was also Malvo who’d sliced the other fella’s throat from ear to ear and left him for dead, and she can’t see him forgiving that easily. “You goin’ after him too?”

He reaches into the pocket of his beat-up leather jacket—for a second she thinks he’s going for a gun after all—and retrieves a crumpled up paper. At first she doesn’t get it: It’s a brochure for vacation insurance, like the one she saw him take from Bo Munk’s office, maybe the very same. White sands and turquoise waters; a couple, smooth-skinned and smiling, under a beach umbrella.  

“Okay,” she says, “okay, so, I’m just gonna run this up to—” She stops. Remembers who she’s talking to. “Are you still. Y’know.” She mimes shooting a pistol with her fingers. “I mean, I could—I oughta be arrestin’ you, so…”

He rolls his eyes, then waves out to the car parked beside the curb. His partner’s sitting in the passenger seat, bundled up under far more layers than the early spring thaw requires. The man waves back, a pistol in his gloved hand. As far as death threats go, it’s practically friendly. 

He didn’t kill her before, in the hospital. And he’s come out of hiding to help her, to give her information that might take months, years to acquire, to hand over the last piece of the puzzle she needs to nail Malvo once and for all and maybe even get Lester along with him, before any more corpses pile up.

It’s something to consider.

Gus had once let Malvo go out of fear for his life, out of love for Greta. Molly’s forgiven him for it, come to care for him all the more for it, for everything he’s fumbled out of the very best of intentions, but it’s only now that she truly _understands_. It’s not strictly speaking _right_ that two killers get to walk free—even if the deaf fella’s all but said he’s quit killing—but measured against the lives that Malvo has taken, that he will continue to take if she doesn’t stop him, measured against her family and the tiny white smudge of hope on the ultrasound that she’s got pinned up on the fridge, letting a retired hit man off the hook doesn’t seem like too steep a price to pay to take down the devil.

She tells herself that she can live with it.

“Don’t suppose you’d testify? No. Didn’t think so. You’d wanna get as far from here as you can, I guess.” She swallows, and it catches in her throat. “Thank you,” she says, “This, er, well, this is a good thing you did, is all. You didn’t have to.”

He’s still for a moment, taking in her words, before he bends down and hugs her hard enough to all but knock the air out of her. It’s so sweet and impulsive that she almost forgets to be afraid of him. Probably it’s just the hormones causing the oddly maternal swell, but after everything, she’s glad he’s alive, even a bit glad he’s not behind bars. She leans her head against his chest, squeezes him back, and whispers, “We’ll get it right this time, I promise. We’ll get him.”

And then he straightens up and, with a final wave at Greta in the kitchen, turns around and walks to the car, out of her life. She feels Greta come up from behind her as she watches him slide into the driver’s seat, signing to his partner beside him.

“But he’s a bad guy,” Greta says. “Like, a _really_ bad guy. Isn’t he?”

“Yeah. Pretty bad.” Molly reaches for the folder. It feels solid and heavy in her hands as a weapon. There’s too much for the FBI to ignore this time. “But there are even worse guys, out there, and he…”

In the car, the two men are having what looks like an argument, judging from the violence of their gestures and the frown carved on the bearded fella’s face. She actually thinks they’re going to start hitting each other when the deaf fella puts his huge hands on his partner’s shoulders and kisses him, a long, slow kiss that’s enough to burn the aggression right out of him. Greta’s mouth drops and Molly shoves the door shut.

“Let’s get done with those sandwiches, okay?” Molly says, her face burning. She tucks the folder under her arm. “I got a lot of work to do.” 

She never sees either man again.

* * *

Wrench and Numbers, however, do see Molly again. 

This time, though, she’s Deputy Solverson, Bemidji PD, and she’s giving a statement on television. Hero or not, she’s red-cheeked and clearly nervous; she ducks her eyes and fixes her hair before the camera cuts to Malvo, a small, inscrutable smile pinching his lips into a V, in the back of a police car. 

Wrench reaches over and rubs the pucker of scar tissue above Numbers’ hip before it can flare into spasm. Numbers huddles into Wrench’s side, listening to the soft rise and fall of his breathing, while his partner’s fingers work the pain out of him. His own breathing echoes it, the panic receding before it can even properly start, Wrench’s warm, strong hands on him a more tangible reality than the image on the screen. 

When Numbers is melted into a loose-limbed heap on his partner’s lap, Malvo’s smile already half-forgotten, Wrench signs, _See, I was right not to kill her._

He summons the momentum to reply, _The fuck you were. A fucking cop._

Wrench shrugs. _She was nice to me._

 _Losing your edge._ He raises himself up on one elbow and cracks open another can. It seems like tempting fate, celebrating with beer and pizza and one cigarette split between the two of them on the worn-out mattress in their fetid, quasi-legal studio apartment, but Wrench is happy enough to go along with it, and they clink the cans together and drink as the program cuts to international news, a suicide bombing in Iraq, a helicopter crash in Mogadishu. 

Numbers still flinches at shadows and looks over his shoulder and he can’t sleep through the night with the creaking floors and the rattling sound from the radiator and the odd late-night job in the garage downstairs—which is fine because Wrench is perfectly capable of snoring through anything, including potential intruders, and _someone_ has to make sure they’re both not murdered in their sleep—but it’s better than it was. He’s a million miles from okay. The work they do get barely covers the rent. Maintaining his usual standards of grooming is well outside the realm of possibility, both because none of the local stores carry the hair gel he uses and their boss does not expect the hired muscle to go around, quote, looking like a couple of fruits.

He’s not quite ready to admit that they got lucky, but it’s starting to seem that way.

 _Finished,_ Wrench replies, as if that settles everything, and switches the channel to NASCAR, because weird as he is, he’s still a fucking Texan, and because he knows it’ll put Numbers to sleep in minutes. He has a few bleary moments—as he’s had every night since Wrench carried him out of the hospital—of wondering what the fuck he’s supposed to do with the rest of his life, before he drifts off to the white noise of car engines and Wrench absentmindedly stroking his hair. 

Over the next few weeks, they watch dominos fall one after another. Safely removed from them, filtered through static on the 6 o’ clock news, none of it seems real. The cops find the box of tapes, leading to Lester Nygaard’s arrest and his brother’s release, leading to exhumations and cold case re-openings, through the dark portal of Malvo’s 20-year-long bloody trail of murder and conspiracy. Malvo’s life’s work unfolds in garish spectacles of shamefully intimate exchanges, taped confessions, quiet unravelings punctuated with the clap of gunshots. If there’s any media interest left in the disappearance of two suspects in the Duluth shootout, it’s buried beneath the avalanche of horror, below the meteoric rise of Molly Solverson’s bright star.

It’s a story, Numbers thinks, that happened to someone else, a long time ago. His own past is drowned in frigid water, the ice already forming over the surface. He’s got guilt and self-loathing for a lifetime, enough to believe that he doesn’t deserve any of this, but pain enough too that he knows he’s paid in blood to have it. Most nights, he lies awake, his partner curled around him, and thinks he’d give his voice a hundred times over to ended up here, his native tongue exchanged for a language shared between just the two of them, a fortress of silence between them and the outside world.

* * *

He doesn’t let Wrench come with him to get the tattoo. The ink’s always been about him and him alone, the only thing he had to himself when he started out, but he acquiesces to getting picked up afterwards and driven home. He can tell Wrench is uneasy at the bandage on his throat; he keeps playing with the tape on the edges and asking what it looks like. 

 _Scabbed,_ Numbers warns him. _Gross._ As if they both haven’t seen each other torn to pieces. Still, he hesitates before peeling the dressing off in front of the bathroom mirror, figures Wrench has seen enough of his skin knitting itself back together after all the brutality he puts it through. He’d rather his partner see him healed up like he’ll be in a week or two, with the tortured wreckage of his body reclaimed, but neither of them are exactly patient people.

Wrench wraps his long arms around him from behind and smirks into the mirror at the line of fire arcing around his neck, a phoenix rising from the flames, its talons twisted into a position that, of all things, took the artist the longest to get right. 

 _You think it’s tacky,_ Numbers signs, folding the gauze back down.

 _Beyond tacky,_ Wrench replies—which is rich coming from a guy who dresses the way he does—and kisses the side of his head. _You realize you’re stuck with me for life now._  

 _I’m stuck not fucking any deaf guys besides you,_ Numbers tells him, and for that he’s hauled bodily out of the bathroom and thrown on the mattress, Wrench’s hands and tongue and teeth letting him know exactly what he thinks of _that_ prospect.

After, they sit on opposite sides of the Formica table, the window cracked open so that Numbers’ cigarette doesn’t make the cramped apartment’s air even less breathable. He raises his hands a few times, thinks to sign, _Of course I am, I always was,_ before deciding that Wrench must have figured that out well before he did.

Wrench just smiles at him, fondly, like he somehow knew that there’d come a day when the killing was done, when they’d leave Fargo in the dust and it’d turn out like this all along. He touches the side of Numbers’ neck, where both the scar and the flames end, and signs, _Does it hurt?_

Numbers grins back and takes a long drag off his cigarette, rolling the smoke around in his mouth before breathing it out into the dry desert air.

 _Yeah,_ he tells his partner. _That’s how you know you’re alive._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "You should watch Fargo," said my evil, sadistic friend, a year after the season had ended. "It has a deaf gay hit man in it. You'll love it. Also I need someone to nerd out with. I feel so alooooone, why doesn't everyone watch this show?"
> 
> Much flailing, and this fic, ensued. I hope you guys liked it! Thanks to everyone who commented and left kudos and encouraged my embarrassing fannish compulsion to leave no adorable character un-resurrected.
> 
> P.S. doublenegativemeansyes, you lovely person, I somehow stumbled across your fabulous illustration, and all your other fabulous illustrations, on the Tumblr. I ended up staring until there was drool on the keyboard. Is it cool if I link to it here?

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Just a Job](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3717202) by [Scrunyuns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scrunyuns/pseuds/Scrunyuns)




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